Interconnected Reality
Spinoza's theory of knowledge appears to make the ontological assumption that reality is an interconnected system. Spinoza himself regarded it as an ultimate intuition. And his theory of knowledge was in some ways a justification of that view. To realise this it is necessary to grasp the fundamental distinction which Spinoza draws between "opinion" and "reason", or perception and understanding. A percept or an image is, for Spinoza, something entirely different from and idea or concept. Conception or understanding is an activity which grasps interconnections, and has nothing to do with images as such. Perception and imagination, on the other hand, are concerned with images and not with connections. And the laws of these two kinds of activities are as different as are their objects. Perception, or imagination, is concerned with images and follows the laws of association; conception or understanding is concerned with connections and follows the laws of logic. Hence Spinoza's insistence that "we can not imagine God, but we can conceive Him". Hence also Spinoza's rejection of Baconian empiricism. From observations of particulars as such it would be impossible, according to Spinoza, to derive laws or necessary connections. The laws or general truths of science rest, in the last resort, not on their correspondence with objects of perception, but on their harmonious interconnection in a system of truths. Spinoza, accordingly, dispenses with an external criterion of truth. "The true," he maintains, "reveals itself and the false." The ultimate test of truth is more truth or more knowledge, or the coherence of all that is known. The false or untrue betrays itself by its incoherence with what is already known. In fact, Spinoza for the most part regards ideas or concepts from the point of view of their adequacy rather than their truth, in order to avoid the suggestion of a merely external correspondence such as is usually associated with the term "truth". Concepts (or "ideas" in this sense) are acts of thought by which the laws and interconnections of things and events are apprehended. They are adequate in so far as they really enable us to systematise a certain range of facts. In that case they are also true, for they agree with the facts. The primacy, however, is with the adequacy of the concept, because until we have the adequate concept we cannot apprehend the facts in such a way that is can be said to agree with them, or to be true.
Read more about this topic: Tractatus De Intellectus Emendatione, Theory of Knowledge
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—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)